(Natural News)
In a move that is sure to get liberal snowflakes rushing to their safe spaces faster than ever, Princeton University is now encouraging students
to report “problematic experiences based on [their] identity.” This
means that if students find themselves in a situation that makes them
feel offended or uncomfortable in anyway, they can – and should,
according to Princeton – go tell somebody about it, even if it is
something that normally wouldn’t result in disci

It’s said that about 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by the second week of February.1
This means if you made one for 2018, there’s a good chance it may
already have failed. There’s also a sizable number of people who set no
goals at all, New Year’s resolutions or otherwise, in part because they
may not realize the importance of goal setting and in part because they
may not know how to do it.2
There are other reasons why you may avoid goal setting as well,

(Natural News)
Beginning shortly after President Donald J. Trump defeated Hillary
Clinton in the 2016 election, Americans were treated to a steady diet of
stories from the American Pravda media claiming that he “colluded” with
the Russian government to “steal the election.”
For months information meant to substantiate the claim, made in the
absence of any real evidence, was “leaked” to various news outlets known
to be friendly to Clinton, Democrats, and every known enemy

Tom Santangelo, a Colorado State University (CSU) researcher and
associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular
Biology, thinks of archaea as “ancient mariners” because they can
survive in the depths of the ocean. Santangelo studies how these “hardy
microbes,” which are one of the three surviving domains of life, express
genes, produce energy, and flourish even in hot and lightless
environments. The researcher has unearthed proof that humans and archaea
are biochemically similar. (Related: Human cells are microscopic in size, yet their jobs are larger than life.)

Along with his team, Santangelo discovered significant parallels
between how archaeal cells and more complex cells like human and animal
cells “package and store their genetic material.” The breakthrough study
was published in Science earlier in 2017 and featured proof
that both archaea and eukaryotic cells have a common mechanism that
compacts, organizes, and structures their genomes.

Karolin Luger led the study, and she is currently a structural
biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. However, most of the
reports published in Science were accomplished when Luger was a faculty member from 1999 to 2015.

To refresh your memory, eukaryotes are cells with a nucleus and
membrane-bound organelles. These cells include fungal, plant, and animal
cells. Human cells are included in eukaryote animal cells.

Eukaryotes are different from prokaryotes, their less complex
counterparts, because the latter do not have a nucleus. Even though
archaea and bacteria are prokaryotes, they are only distantly related.
It is believed that archaea are the progenitors of eukaryotes since they
share many of the same proteins responsible for controlling gene
expression.

Every eukaryote, such as microscopic protists, plants, and even
humans, is capable of “life’s most fundamental processes,” which
includes the methods wherein “DNA bends, folds, and crams itself into a
cell nucleus.”

Inside the nucleus of each eukaryotic cell is several feet of genetic
material compacted in a particular way. Small DNA segments are wrapped
at least two times around eight histones (small proteins), “like thread
around a spool.” The resulting DNA-histone complex is called a
nucleosome, while a string of compacted nucleosomes is called chromatin.
In 1997, Luger et al. first reported the exact structure of eukaryotic
nucleosomes through X-ray crystallography.

In the 1900s, John Reeve, a science paper collaborator, discovered
that aside from eukaryotes, histone proteins can also be found in
nucleus-free archaea cells. Reeves and Luger then worked together to
crystallize histone-based archaeal chromatin, which was compared to
eukaryotic chromatin.

Following years of a “gnarly crystallographic problem” where the
researchers had difficulty growing reliable archaeal histone crystals,
they were finally able to discern the structure of archaeal chromatin,
which was similar in structure to eukaryotes.

Based on this data, it was revealed that archaeal DNA formed long and
curvy repeating superhelices. Because the researchers weren’t sure if
the structure was real, or simply an artifact of the experiment,
Santangelo’s CSU team stepped in. He commented that his group took it
upon themselves to figure out if “the structure resolved in the crystals
represented a biologically meaningful structure” or not.

Santangelo’s team created variants of the archaeal histones, which
were then tested to see how the cells fared when they disrupted the DNA
superhelix. The team then discovered that when the structure was
destabilized, the cells got sicker. Thanks to their efforts, the merits
of the structure Luger’s group isolated were made clear.

Santangelo added that his work with his team was one of the
highlights of his career and that their work helped provide fundamental
insight into the origins of human cells. He said, “The major impact of
the paper, I think, is that the idea of compacting DNA into those
structures is a very ancient idea — probably more than one billion years
old.” The researcher continued, “Histone proteins came on the scene,
and once they got into and started packaging genomes, they largely made
themselves indispensable to those cells that encoded them.”

The researcher will continue studying the “structure, function, and
energy transactions of archaea,” microorganisms that are a precursor to
human cellular activity.